Tip of the Iceberg

Tracking Tesla Job Postings

Thu, 03 Jun 2021 17:00:02 GMT

June 3, 2021

We have spent hundreds of hours creating a database that compiles job posting data from companies we follow and in which we invest. We have kept this proprietary; however, given how closely so many people try to track Tesla’s hiring sprees, we have decided to open our 2020-2021 Tesla job postings database to the public. Tesla’s hiring over the past six quarters has been particularly interesting to follow, especially as Tesla builds two new state-of-the-art factories. We hope you find our visualizations fun and useful.

January 2021 was the peak, where our data show the highest monthly new job postings. These charts and maps can be misleading, as they show when the jobs were posted, not when the jobs were filled. That being said, it is helpful to understand for which jobs, in which locations a company is hiring.

All of these charts and maps are interactive. You can click data series to show/hide, and you can pause the timelines on the maps and hover over each data point for more information on the individual job posting.

Initial Takeaways

Tesla breaks its jobs into 14 categories. Among the top four, “Service & Energy Installation” saw the highest surge since last summer, followed by “Manufacturing”. The category “Service & Energy Installation” is vague, but it has been the fastest growing segment for which Tesla seems to be hiring since July, 2020. In the chart below, the majority of “Service & Energy Installation” jobs contain the words “install”, “electrician”, “energy”, “vehicle technician”, and “Solar Roof”.

Since last summer, Tesla has been hiring many of its solar and energy installers that previously worked as independent contractors, though those jobs would not necessarily show up as new job postings unless Tesla makes those individuals reapply. Still, though, job titles containing the word “electrician” are among the highest “Service & Energy Installation” positions. Note some postings may be double counted, as these are only results from keywords within the job names.

It appears Tesla went on two hiring sprees for “Solar Roof” positions in the summer of 2020 and winter of 2020/2021, though those positions tend not to necessarily contain the word “install” (including “installation” and “installer”), as the two do not appear strongly correlated. Tesla typically refers to Solar Roof installer positions as “Solar Roofer”. Since the beginning of 2020, Tesla has posted more jobs for Solar Roof than vehicle technicians.

Among Tesla’s five “Gigafactories”, Fremont factory, and Palo Alto headquarters, the two factories currently producing vehicles have remained the focus for new job postings. Recently, there has been a surge in job postings at Gigafactory 3 in Shanghai. The dotted blue line shows how many internships Tesla posts, which are historically posted in the winter.

Fremont has had consistently high volumes of job postings since June 2020. Hirings at Gigafactory Shanghai surged toward the end of 2020, likely due to MIC Model Y production ramping, and job postings have remained abundant there throughout 2021. Shanghai job postings will likely continue to rise as Tesla builds out its new R&D center there.

Gigafactory Texas and Gigafactory Berlin should have more job postings as those factories get closer to construction completion and the start of production. Gigafactory Texas appears to be further ahead than Gigafactory Berlin, based on its job postings in several categories. We pointed this out in a thread on Twitter in April.

The heat map shows the volume of job openings at various Tesla locations. Unsurprisingly, Fremont, Austin, Berlin, and Shanghai have consistently high volumes of job postings. Other hotspots include Sparks, NV; Hawthorne, CA; Beijing, China; and Shenzhen, China.

In Q4 2020, TSLA’s SG&A expenses increased 38.6% Y/Y to $969M. This increase can be attributed to, in part, opening new showrooms and service centers, as well as expanding sales, marketing, and legal departments across China and Europe. Before the global Model 3 rollout, Tesla’s quarterly SG&A was between $600M-$750M. As Tesla continues to shift its focus to China and Europe, these expenses should maintain a similar growth rate. Obviously, Tesla does not break out SG&A, so this job data can be especially helpful in trying to understand where the additional capital is being deployed. The answer: mostly China. [ See our May 20, 2021 note ]

Tesla's Real Focus of 2021: China

Gigafactory Shanghai almost always outpaces other Tesla locations in terms of job postings, especially recently. In March, Elon Musk said in an interview , “China in the long term will be [Tesla’s] biggest market, both where we make the most number of vehicles and where we have the most number of customers.” Musk knows Tesla needs to produce a car specifically for the Chinese market, and fast. [S ee our February 8th, 2021 note ]

It is not surprising that Gigafactory Shanghai is out-hiring all other Tesla locations, even as GF4 and GF5 scale. Gigafactory Shanghai needs all the help it can get if Tesla wants to keep up with the growing competition in the largest EV market. S3XY models won’t be sexy forever, especially when domestic automakers can already give Chinese consumers what they want in a vehicle (and for a lot cheaper, in most cases).

“Design” job postings have been popping up in Texas, Berlin, and Shanghai. It seems Tesla is looking to design “market vehicles” unique to Euro pe and China, and has been recently posting jobs for designers and engineers specifically for the new R&D center in Shanghai. The primary objective of Tesla’s new R&D center is to develop a “Chinese-style” EV, which may be Tesla's first “$25k model”. Tesla has been hiring for the R&D team for a while, but some job posts (along with an interesting Franz von Holzhausen recruitment video ) indicate it has yet to hire a Chief Designer and Senior Vehicle Designer for the new Chinese model. The fact that Tesla is still looking for design heads for the China model suggests the car is not coming anytime soon.

The new Shanghai R&D center will have 20 laboratories for vehicle design, engineering, development, testing, etc.; among them will likely be a battery testing facility. Battery safety is an important factor for Chinese consumers purchasing EVs; Tesla is hiring battery testing engineers, likely to address this concern. Most of these positions have yet to be hired.

The map below is the same as the one above, but with different colors assigned to job categories.

Tracking Turnover at Tesla

Some of the most telling data are the turnover rates across positions. Tesla assigns a unique ID number to each job posting, known as a Requisition ID (Req. ID). As far as we have tracked, Req. IDs stay with employees through promotions, and are typically only reused when Tesla employees quit or are fired. By tracking how long between postings using the same Req. ID, we get a sense of how long employees stay with Tesla, and which divisions/teams have high turnover.

The same Req. ID may be used in different regions for different job titles, so they are not always sequentially suggestive. Throughout the past two years, Tesla has hidden the date positions were added and sometimes doesn’t post the Req. IDs, but we can almost always find it in the source code of the posting.

We will not be sharing these data publicly, but we have noticed a recent uptick in high-level departures, notably from the Autopilot and cell teams, and they aren’t being filled.

“Legal & Government Affairs” job postings have increased over the past few months, suggesting Tesla is shaking up its legal/compliance department. There have been recent postings for in-house legal positions, some at the most senior levels, in Fremont, Palo Alto, Austin, Berlin, Amsterdam, Oslo, Tokyo, and several cities in China. Tesla has come under fire for lacking effective counsel, and instead letting Elon Musk call the shots, which could explain why the company is looking to hire more lawyers and policy advisors globally.

Most of the recent “Legal & Government Affairs” job postings appear to be in China. Tesla was summoned by China’s State Administration for Market Regulation to discuss quality complaints in early February 2021, so Tesla may be hiring more legal professionals to help avoid clashing with Chinese authorities. Tesla/Musk have been much more cooperative with the Chinese Government than with the U.S. Government.

Until May, there had only been 17 job postings within the “Marketing & Communications” category in 2021, which was not surprising, given Tesla scrapped its PR department. However, last month, Tesla posted more jobs for Marketing & Communications positions than the prior 16 months combined. All of the "Marketing & Communications" positions posted in May were in China, where Tesla desperately needs them. It is important to note 49% of Tesla's "Marketing & Communications" positions posted since 2020 were for internships, 56% this year, and 2/3 in May.

This map shows which positions have been filled (closed), and which remain open. We typically see jobs that require more experience remain open longer; low-skilled and entry-level positions typically fill faster. In the U.S., remote and energy installation positions in areas where Tesla/SolarCity never had a presence appear to fill much faster than bigger hubs. Tesla appears to have filled a lot of positions in Europe. Clusters of red dots suggest new showrooms and service centers opening, which tend to have much higher turnover rates in Europe (the same positions/Req. IDs at the same locations, so red followed by green). In China, many positions posted since November remain open.

In January 2021, Tesla posted a heap of jobs in the Yangtze Delta, and almost all of them remain open. In late February/early March 2021, another cluster of jobs were posted in the Pearl River Delta. Tesla has not filled most positions in those regions, as wages are much higher in China’s first-tier and second-tier cities, but it is clear those hubs are Tesla’s focus for 2021 in China.

A clear take away from these data is that China is becoming the focus of Tesla since Q3 2020. Though most positions are largely unfilled, Tesla is recruiting all over China. Beginning in late December, Tesla has been actively recruiting directly from Chinese universities. We have not seen Tesla do this, especially at that scale. 44.6% of these Chinese university positions are summer 2021 internships. Still, though, the rest are assumed to be positions for which Tesla is trying to recruit students directly after graduation. This is a common practice for major MNCs in China, to which Tesla has finally caught on.

There was a surge of jobs with the words “electrode”, “cell”, or “pilot line” in the title after Tesla’s Battery Day in September. In true Musk fashion, he and Drew Baglino touted “novel” battery technologies before Tesla had begun hiring specifically for those positions. New job postings mentioning “pilot line” for 4680 cells peaked in January, despite many Tesla fans hoping Tesla had been rolling production-ready cells off that line since the fall. We noted in March that key positions for inventing important technologies for Tesla’s 4680 cells, notably battery cell jobs in San Diego (Maxwell) for the dry electrode coating process, were not yet filled . Some of those jobs have since been filled/removed from Tesla’s job postings, and some remain open, suggesting Tesla’s new cells may still be stuck at the lab level.

As for the pilot line, since January 2020, Tesla has posted 105 positions specifically for cell design, engineering, and production at 47700 Kato Road and 1055 Page Avenue (AKA “Kato Road”, where Tesla is building its 4680 pilot line), just two miles south of its Fremont Factory. Of those, 62 positions are still open.

This is a searchable database of 22,938 Tesla job postings from January 1, 2020 to May 31, 2021. Tesla had over 70,000 people employed by the end of last year, and could employ over 100,000 people by the end of next year, according to Electrek . These are just some of our initial thoughts. You could spend hours poking around the maps alone.

Cheers.

Hedging a Global Pandemic

Mon, 01 Feb 2021 19:50:32 GMT

February 1, 2021

Over a year ago—when only a few people in China had died from a mysterious virus—we updated our investors on the threat of what would become the COVID-19 global pandemic.

Regarding the potential spread of COVID-19 (and consequential global economic fallout), we did the math, and were frightened. This was in January.

At the time, we didn’t know what “RT-PCR” meant; we even capitalized the ‘c’ in “Coronavirus”, and referred to it as “ the Coronavirus”. Shows how little we knew.

We were frantically trying to learn as much as we could, and were translating news in Mandarin, calling doctors we knew to ask how bad this could get (which, incidentally, every doctor with whom we spoke told us the virus isn’t a big deal), and deeply researched the SARS outbreak of 2002-2003. It is our business to try to understand, prepare for, and invest in the future. We tried to prepare and hedge as strategically as we could.

We had to think in a mindset where millions of people in the U.S. and around the world were infected, even though only a few people in China had died from the virus at the time. When nearly the entire world is locked in their homes, hundreds of thousands of people are dying from the virus, businesses of all sizes are already bankrupt, and no end is in sight, it is hard to think of investment opportunities. That’s how we had to think, though. In January 2020. It is worth noting that we are long-only, so we didn’t even consider shorting any stocks; we weren’t thinking in that mindset—we were only looking for opportunities.

The first opportunity we found was in genome sequencing. BGI was a company we knew well, and the word across the pond was that BGI was working faster and better than any other company to try to help scientists better understand the SARS-CoV-2 strain (the strain that causes COVID-19)—BGI sequenced the SARS-CoV-2 genome in just 10 days (SARS-CoV-1 sequencing took 195 days in 2002).

This is a letter we sent to our investors over a year ago.

We then identified more investment opportunities if/when the virus spread globally: telemedicine, e-learning, masks/PPE, were the focus. We made our own COVID-19 dashboards and scraped the few data we could find by hand, long before there were online COVID-19 dashboards.

When it became a global pandemic, we were not surprised—we were prepared.

EV Estimates

Fri, 20 Nov 2020 21:56:59 GMT

November 20, 2020

Mass adoption of EVs, along with the emergence of new EV companies, will mark 2021 as the true beginning of the global shift to transportation electrification. We are sharing our EV estimates out to 2040.

While we were hesitant to project so far out, recent changes have rendered a more realistic outlook. Estimates of this scale require millions of data points and months of modeling. Based on recent national EV targets, li-ion battery price reductions & a clear shift to LFP batteries, promising new entrants to the EV space, public charging infrastructure build outs, and a general consumer shift to EVs, estimating 20 years out isn’t as unreasonable as it has been.

The first chart and the last chart are interactive. Select/deselect the series in the legend to show/hide.

The biggest variable to any EV/AV estimate is varying government policies. To an extent, it is not practical to project EV sales beyond even 2025 due to such an uncertainty. However, in just the past few months, many countries have made their NEV targets significantly more clear, which helps us at least see the general trend better.

We have seen public charging infrastructure become less of an unknown variable on EV adoption over the last two years, and therefore battery energy density and range anxiety have less of an effect on mass EV adoption. From here on out, affordability and safety will be the most important factors to mass EV adoption, not range and performance.

The key difference between a short-term EV/AV forecast and a long-term forecast is the short-term is highly dependent on the company choosing the right technology approach–both battery chemistry and AV sensor suites/neural nets.

The benefit of forecasting in the long-term is the general assumption that the industry will choose the right technologies, and OEMs will inevitably utilize them. For example, let’s say Tesla is ‘wrong’ in its approach to L4/5 autonomy, in that the cars cannot fully operate autonomously with the current sensor suite (cameras & radar). If, say, LiDAR becomes a clear essential to L4+ AVs (or even that governments require AVs to be equipped with certain sensors or V2X systems, which they will), the assumption is that Tesla will eventually switch to the ‘industry standard’, rather than be left behind. The same framework applies to battery technology. As it currently looks, LFP batteries will be the ‘industry standard’ for some time. Solid-state battery development is nowhere close to where the industry expected. That being said, the companies that do choose the ‘right’ technologies earlier on will have distinct first-mover advantage.

Tesla

Starting with Tesla, we are sharing our company-specific estimates. Tesla is an important company to analyze since it may be the earliest EV/AV company to peak (2032/2033).

Most estimates out there mistime Tesla’s robotaxi rollout. Robotaxi rollouts are just as much about government regulation as they are about technological viability. AV policies vary more by country, county, city, and borough than EV policies.

Unsurprisingly, we believe Tesla will lose market share in the passenger EV space globally after it peaks next year. Market share peaks vary by region mainly due to EV/AV policy.

First-mover advantage is exactly what got Tesla to its current dominance in the EV space. However, as we know, first-mover advantage doesn’t last forever. This is where many Tesla forecasts go awry. Assuming two in every three passenger EVs sold in 2030 will be made by a single company is unreasonable. Another common mistake some make are zany estimates of total EVs sold. Forecasting Tesla to have an 18% market share in 2024 is fine (ours is 18.29%), but to also forecast Tesla will sell 7.1M EVs that year would suggest 39.4M total EV sales. Among other global EV estimates for 2024, BNEF & Deloitte are forecasting ~7.4M, S&P Global Market Intelligence estimates 6.2M, and we are forecasting 11.4M. We know our 2024 estimate is more bullish than most; 39.4M in just four years is so clearly misguided and misleading. Price targets based on such unfounded assumptions are dangerous.

While investors can certainly be optimistic about a company’s future, they should still be reasonable and practical about the assumptions on which their theses are based. In 2030, between 25M-35M passenger EVs will be sold globally... total .

20M deliveries by a single EV maker is unrealistic. That would be more than Toyota and Volkswagen Group’s 2019 sales combined. Vehicle sales have declined since their peak in 2017; even as the global economy recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic, it will take years to recover to pre-COVID sales figures. By that point, there will be many EV options that rival Tesla on price and range.

When we combine our global passenger EV estimates with our estimates for Tesla's regional market share, Tesla's annual passenger deliveries peak in 2032 at 6.87M units. As things currently stand, Tesla may be one of the first to beta test a robotaxi fleet in select (highly gridded) cities. We don't see a meaningful (>8,000 cars in one city) Tesla robotaxi fleet until 2028 at the earliest. We expect Tesla's sales to be strong in the few years following the first successful robotaxi deployment, but competitors will quickly catch up, and first-mover syndrome will again kick in.

Electric vehicle's comparative longevity over ICE vehicles has been an important selling point. The fact of the matter is: EVs' sales cycles will be considerably longer, and therefore, demand in areas with high EV/AV saturation will plateau, and eventually decline.

We have also broken down Tesla’s sales by model based on current timelines for future product rollouts. In the long-term, the lower-priced models (3/Y/$25k model) will be Tesla’s best-selling. Cybertruck will be relatively short-lived–we just cannot see it being a long-term player in the relatively few pickup truck markets, especially as electric pickup trucks from Ford, GM, Rivian, Lordstown, etc. roll out. We see Cybertruck sales peaking in 2027 at 206,000, and falling sharply thereafter. Roadster will be too expensive to make up any meaningful sales, especially as competitors roll out more electric supercars, even in the next few years. Model S and X are already becoming less popular due to the cannibalization from 3 and Y, and a $25k model will only contribute to this decline. Model Y will soon become more popular than Model 3, and the $25k model will become the most popular Tesla model within the first three quarters of its launch. As Tesla brings costs down to produce more cars for the masses, its higher-end model sales will be eclipsed.

A $25k Tesla will be significantly more important over the next decade than its robotaxi fleet. Many estimates assume Tesla’s robotaxi fleet will be deployed as early as next year. The Full Self-Driving beta was released to a handful of Tesla owners last month, and it is already showing how long Tesla still has to go before achieving L4/5, if it's at all possible. Even if Tesla launches robotaxi software next year, it will still undoubtedly require a human driver in the vehicle (L3). Tesla owners may use their own cars for ride-hailing, but fleets of fully autonomous vehicles are years away, and Tesla won’t be the only company to deploy them.

Stay tuned for more company-specific estimates, as well as commercial EV estimates, which will be most meaningful to a cleaner future.

Chinese EV Stocks’ Recent Surge, Visualized

Thu, 12 Nov 2020 21:12:28 GMT

November 12, 2020

Over the past six years, the rankings of the largest automakers by market capitalization have shifted, especially recently as EVs have gained traction. The data in the interactive data visualizations below are all the same, but are shown five different ways.

As you may notice from the first visual, the usual suspects lead the pack in 2015 – Volkswagen, Toyota, Daimler, BMW, Ford, General Motors, and Honda.

The same visual is shown below, this time broken out by country. Among the top seven most valuable automakers in 2015, three were German, two were Japanese, and two were American. Fast forward to today, and the mix by country looks very different: two American companies, one Japanese, two German, and this time, two Chinese automakers.

Eight of the 25 most valuable automakers are Chinese today; only three are American.

You may notice three of the top five most valuable automakers today primarily sell EVs. While EVs only account for less than 3% of new car sales globally, their valuations have recently soared. Tesla, BYD, NIO, and Xpeng, which make majority (if not all) EVs, have risen to the top of the rankings, while traditional internal combustion engine (ICE) makers, such as Ford, Honda, and GM, continue to sink lower. This is indicative and representative of the overall shift to EVs, and the market’s realization of this shift.

Notably, Tesla began its surge to the top in 2020. The four other automakers primarily producing EVs (BYD, NIO, XPeng, Li Auto) currently among the top 25 have recently surged in rank. In June 2020, NIO was the 22nd most valuable automaker, and BYD was the 14th. Xpeng and Li Auto weren’t even public yet. Today, BYD and NIO are the 4th and 5th most valuable automakers, respectively, and Xpeng and Li Auto are already the 12th and 16th most valuable automakers, respectively.

NIO has been public for just over two years, and is already the world’s 5th largest automaker in terms of market cap. Chinese automakers continue to creep up in the rankings, which is unsurprising given the increasing amount of EV companies starting to bear fruit in China.

Battery pack prices have plummeted over the last five years. It is cheaper to manufacture EVs than ICE vehicles. According to BNEF , battery prices have fallen from an average of $373/kWh in 2015 to as low as $85/kWh today. Prices will continue to fall as production ramps up, through economies of scale, and with new technological breakthroughs and innovations.

Four of the five EV companies on this list are Chinese.

Investors have realized that EVs are the future, as have China’s EV companies. Electric vehicles are here to stay; no longer is that disputed. Traditional automakers need to accelerate their transitions from ICE vehicles to EVs; they are already being left behind. 2020 has been an especially transformative year for EV makers, and this is just the beginning. The "rising tide lifts all boats" phenomenon in the EV space has been led by Tesla, but it is no longer a winner-take-all scenario, and Chinese EV companies with weaker brand recognition in the West are only getting stronger. There is no limit to the number of winners in the race to make the planet more sustainable.